


Rose Lies

by alwaysyourqueen



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Episode AU: s02e13 Doomsday, Episode: s02e13 Doomsday, F/M, POV Rose, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:06:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27440173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alwaysyourqueen/pseuds/alwaysyourqueen
Summary: "Here I am at last. And this is the story of how I died."Rose Tyler says goodbye to her Doctor in Bad Wolf Bay. She lies to him.
Relationships: Jackie Tyler & Rose Tyler, Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	1. Dårlig Ulv Stranden

Rose Tyler spent so much time traveling hundreds of miles to walk onto a beach in Norway. She stood on the sand and it was like standing in a walk-in fridge, but she stood with the wind of Dårlig Ulv Stranden through her hair. There were a hundred different things through her head, but above all else she was trying to decide what exactly to tell him. Whether to tell him the truth.

A few feet in front of her, an image appeared. It looked like a see-through screen, but there he stood. The Doctor. Her Doctor.

“Where are you?” she asked, her voice quavering from the tension of where they stood.

“Inside the TARDIS.” He shifted how he stood slightly as he did. It was easy to forget that he didn’t just always stand still if he wasn’t Doctoring about, gesturing and blabbering on and on. Like when he wasn’t being looked at, he was a statue that hardly moved. “There's one tiny little gap in the Universe left, just about to close, and it takes a lot of power to send this projection. I'm in orbit around a supernova.” His eyes grew wistful, for a moment, as he glanced about at something she couldn’t see.

She wondered if he could see her like she was seeing him, or if it was for her benefit only. He probably had some clever idea. She’d never know.

“I'm burning up a sun just to say goodbye.”

“You look like a ghost.”

“Hold on,” he responded, using his sonic screwdriver on something she couldn’t see. Suddenly, instead of looking like a pre-recorded message from the 22nd century, he came into full view. He was there, standing on the beach with her.

Never the type to pray, Rose pleaded with the universe for a long moment, and asked, “Can I?” Her arm reached out. Her fingers almost close enough to touch his arm.

“I’m still just an image. No touch.” He said it in the way she’d gotten used to, where his feelings bled out through every pore if you just knew to look. She knew to look. She watched as he looked like he needed a hug more badly than she’d ever seen.

“Can’t you come through properly?” It was hard to keep her voice from breaking. Every inch of her body was screaming.

The Doctor shook his head. Not emphatically, but in resignation.“The whole thing would fracture. Two universes would collapse.”

She couldn’t help herself. “So?” She bit her lip afterwards.

“Where are we?” Avoiding her sort-of question, but she didn’t blame him. It wasn’t fair, not really, for her to say that. “Where did the gap come out?”

“We’re in Norway.”

“Norway. Right.” He looked surprised. She supposed now she was glad it was Norway rather than China, or Brazil, or the Arctic.

“About fifty miles out of Burgen. It’s called Dårlig Ulv Stranden.” The irony was impossible to miss. She’d sent the words through time and space for herself, but she hadn’t remembered sending them here. One final call to bring her to the Doctor.

“Dalek?”

The connection must not have been as good as advertised. Not to mention that it was one of the reasons they were even needing this conversation. She imagined all the places they could have gone, but she couldn’t imagine somewhere she wanted to be more than the TARDIS.

“No it’s Dårlig. Norwegian for bad.” She couldn’t help but laugh at it, now she said it out loud. “This translates as Bad Wolf Bay.”

The Doctor put on a smile. It wasn’t a real, full smile, but she liked to see it anyways.

“How long have we got?”

The Doctor glanced around again before saying, “About two minutes.”

“I can’t think of what to say.” She thought about it. Her stomach churned and she felt bile threaten to come up her throat.

“You’ve still got Mister Mickey, then?”

If there was ever a time the Doctor stopped making fun of Mickey, that’s when she’d be worried that it wasn’t him anymore. “There’s, em, five of us now. Mum, Dad, Mickey, and the baby.”

The Doctor’s face faltered. His lip quivered, and he looked stunned. “You’re not?”

Rose remembered their time together. Their goofy antics, their love and the fire that raged in her when she thought about him. She remembered how lonely he was when they first met, and how he had thrived in their time together. How he had seemed so genuinely happy. If she told him, and he knew, it would break his hearts. She hesitated.

“No. It’s Mum. She’s three months gone. More Tylers on the way.” She brushed a piece of hair behind her ear, and she has to break eye contact. She wants nothing but to look at him, but she’s afraid that she won’t be able to hold this up if she does before she’s ready.

When her gaze does come back up to him, she can see his eyes. They are eyes that know her as well as she knows them. She wonders if he knows.

“And what about you?” He tried to move on from the subject. “Are you?”

“Yeah, I’m back working in the shop.” She decided to distract from the pieces of her heart sinking the pit of her chest by yanking the Doctor around a bit.

She remembers when they first met, and how she spent her days grabbing chips between shifts and laughing with Mickey. How she was only a couple years out of school and already more responsible than her mum in a lot of ways. How she must have looked to him. “Oh, good for you.”

“Shut up. No, I’m not.” She laughed again, but it’s a tense laugh. There’s no joy, just trying to keep herself stable for the most important conversation in her life. “There’s still a Torchwood on this planet, and it’s open for business. I think I know a thing or two about aliens.”

“Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth.” Rose had decided what she would miss the most about the Doctor is the way he looked at her. His big brown eyes, looking at her that way, was the thing that made her fall in love with him.

She was removed from her thoughts by more stupid, useless words. “You’re dead, officially, back home. So many people died that day, and you’ve gone missing. You’re on a list of the dead.” He laughed, but it was the same laugh she’d just shared. Not a laugh, more of a comma. “Here you are, living a life day after day. The one adventure I can never have.” She would never miss that look. The look where his eyes became endless pits, and she could see the nine hundred years of life sinking away into the distance.

“Am I ever going to see you again?” She wanted to find some way out. Some way to tell him there was that life, day to day, waiting for him here. A family, a new proper family, that wouldn’t even wait for him to arrive.

“You can’t.”

She hated that word. And how he said it like it was a fact, of all space and time, and that nothing could ever change it. She hated that he was probably right.

“What’re you going to do?”  _ Without me. _ It didn’t need to be said.

There he was, the Doctor she’d met on some boring day at her boring job. The man who stood out in any crowd, no matter how ordinary his suit. “Oh, I’ve got the TARDIS. Same old life, last of the Time Lords.”

“On your own.” Tears welled in her eyes, finally, and she choked back a proper sob. “I, I love you.”

“Quite right, too.” The Doctor smiled. This was a real smile, and she tried to imprint every crease of his cheeks into her memory, forever. “And, I suppose, if it’s one last chance to say it.”

He looked at her like she was made of stars and burned like the sun. “Rose Tyler.”

But he never finished the sentence. She saw as his image didn’t fade away, but merely vanished, as though she had been talking to nothing but air the entire time. The bile that had teased her came up through her throat, and she heaved her breakfast onto the sands. She heard her mother’s footsteps behind her, and she felt arms wrap around her sides.


	2. Home

“You didn’t tell him.”

Rose hardly hears the words. Not because she’s loud, she stopped crying hours ago. She forgets to exist as Rose Tyler.

After a long silence, she finally whispers, “I couldn’t, Mum.” Her throat catches the words, like it was trying to stop her from speaking. It doesn’t want to.

Her mother once again wraps arms around her and holds her. She feels like a child again, needing her mother to hold her because she scraped a knee. Only she doesn’t have a scraped knee, and instead she’s mourning the love of her life, who is still alive. “I know, sweetheart.”

“Do you, though, Mum?” Rose yanks herself away from her mother’s grasp. “Do you really think that you know how it feels? I mean, I know you lost Dad, and that was hard, but this is so different.” She ran her fingers through her hair and turned away from her mother. “Because the Doctor is so different, and we never had even a thought of settling down. I was going to travel with him and his TARDIS for the rest of my life. And then everything happens so fast, and I find myself here, and I have to learn to live without him. Just as an extra kicker, I find out I’m having a baby, and I just so happen to get to say goodbye.”

Jackie hesitates, perhaps for the first time in her life, to comment.

“And he tells me to my face that he’s burning up a sun to say goodbye. He’s speeding up the destruction of a star because he wants to talk to me, and do you think he’d really stay there and sit back if I told him that he was going to have a baby he can never ever meet?”

“Oh, Rose.” Her mother comes back to her side, but this time didn’t try to hug or comfort her. “I think you did the right thing. Cause what’s worrying him going to do?”

“Do you think that makes it any better?” Rose gets up from where she’d been sitting, wiping away the tears from her cheeks. “The last thing I did to the love of my life was lie, right to his face, and waste time so he couldn’t actually tell me how he felt.”

Rather than wait for her mother to say anything else, she storms towards the door and follows the path of the hallways outside. On the porch, she finds the hammock they’d set up there. She sits down in it, only to find her stomach churning again. She hurries over the railing and vomits into the flowerbed. She’s internally thankful that she hadn’t eaten because all that comes out is disgusting-tasting water.

Finally settled into the hammock, she lets it gently swing back and forth. At first, she tries to sleep. It never comes, so instead she just lies there. One of her hands goes over her abdomen, and she tries to imagine herself with a baby. She’d spent two years only imagining traveling through the stars, on distant worlds and all throughout history.

Now her future includes naptime, warming up bottles, and getting her dad to babysit while she does advisory work for Torchwood. Or more than advisory, depending on how the next phase of research works. Her future also includes doctor visits (with a medical professional, not her Doctor) and paying bills.

“What d’you think?” she asks, quietly, out loud. Then she scoffs at herself. “I’m asking my unborn baby if they want to be born. This is what you do to me, Doctor.”

The only answer she gets is the gentle tink-tink of the wind chimes.

“I think that you’re enjoying causing problems. Not even born and giving your mother a heart attack.” She kicks her foot a few times to get the hammock to swing. “If you’re anything like your father, you’re not going to stop causing problems ever in your life. You’ll get all the brains from him too, and finish your secondary school with good marks.”

Her monologue is interrupted by the door of the house opening. She hears footsteps coming out and sits up to see who it is.

It’s her mother. Again.

“Sorry.” She doesn’t really mean it, but she settles back into the hammock.

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry.” Jackie walks over and leans against the railing. “I shouldn’t have pushed. I know this is hard.”

“Hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“You know, finding out I was pregnant with you wasn’t easy either.” She leans back a bit and turns her head to look at the lawn in front of the house. “Blimey, that’s a smell. Did something-” But she interrupts herself a moment later when her head bobs over the railing.

“Didn’t have time to run to the toilet,” Rose says.

“You know what, let’s get you a proper cup of tea. Inside you go, come on.” Without waiting for an answer, Jackie helps Rose up from where she’s sitting and guides her inside, where she all but falls onto the couch.

“Like I was saying, it wasn’t easy when I got pregnant with you. Pete and I had been married less than a year, and he didn’t exactly have a consistent job.” Noises in the kitchen sounded like she was finding mugs and a kettle for tea. “So I start getting sick, and I grab a test when I’m around at the shop. I didn’t really believe it, I don’t think, not until I went to the doctor and got a proper test.”

“How is this supposed to make me feel better?” Rose calls out from her pit on the couch, sinking into it as far as she can, curled up in a ball.

“I’m getting to it!” her mother calls back. “So a few months later, I’m telling my family, letting everybody know the big news, and my mum, your granny Miriam, asks to come over for tea. I say sure and make her a nice cup. She comes in, and she tells me, ‘Jackie, there’s a lot of things in life you just have to deal with. But your kid always has to be more important than anything else. You sit them down, and you love them like you’ve never loved anyone else in your whole life.’ I didn’t expect to hear that, not from her. But she’s right. You put them before anything else, and you love them like you’ve never loved anyone.”

Rose finds herself stunned. She doesn’t even know what to say, and she stays that way until her mother shoves a cup of herbal tea into her hands. She sips at it, trying not to burn her tongue. “Thanks, mum.”

“Anytime.”


End file.
